Reba Gleason looks out the kitchen window, surprised to see that the ducks that had nested by the pool all spring have returned. Not until an arm emerges lazily from the water, followed windmill-style by the other, does she understand that what she briefly mistook for the pintail feathers of a mother duck is actually a woman’s hair, fanned out around her face as she swims on her back. It’s Frances Hartmann.
     Had she invited Frances for a swim? Perhaps Frances had issued her own invitation? Reba can’t recall. Why hadn’t she at least rung the bell and announced herself? Then what? Actually, today isn’t the best, Frances.
     Reba knows she should march outside and say just that. Instead, she ponders the salad greens for this evening’s dinner, and prays that Frances will simply slip away. Then she spots the chaise lounge, which Frances has cloaked in a brilliant towel and repositioned to take advantage of the late summer sun. Frances is here for the long haul.
     Reba glares at her friend who is now treading water, energetically scissoring her arms overhead. It’s a move she likely acquired at one of the spas she frequents. Frances is Reba’s oldest friend, yet except for their age—54—the two have little in common. Frances loves to shop. She embraces, with evangelical fervor, the most rigorous fad diets, and is conversant with Oprah’s books. The two share history, though; Frances is the closest thing Reba has to a sister. But even a sister shouldn’t show up uninvited.
     Reba makes a deal with herself. If Frances isn’t gone by the time she finishes with the salad, she’ll march outside and …  And what?  She couldn’t even buy the greens she’d desired. “We don’t carry that,” the clerk had said. That. As if even the word were distasteful, though she imagines that soon enough iceberg will stage a remarkable comeback. The clerk suggested frisee. “Perfect,” Reba replied, though she finds the taste bitter; the texture off-putting, like eating feathers.  Cowed, by a young man with an extraordinary tattoo snaking up his forearm.
     Cowed by Michael, too. He’d arranged the dinner. Without consulting her. He even suggested the menu: Rosemary chicken; miniature purple potatoes, their cost inversely proportionate to their size; cheesecake. The salad.
     Reba has stopped collecting Michael’s shirts at the cleaners, and started mismatching his socks. The other day she changed the pillowcases on her side of the bed only. Yet here she is preparing the dinner he had promised to cook for Dan and his fiancée.
     Until recently, Dan had been married to Frances. They’d wed three weeks after Reba and Michael. To the delight of Reba and Frances, a foursome quickly developed. That was thirty years ago. Now Michael assumes that the foursome, albeit slightly modified, will be maintained. He has accused Reba of being stubborn, unyielding, and claims not to understand her discomfort around newly configured couples, of which, lately, there have been too many. Divorce has infected their circle of friends; there have been a few deaths, too.
     It’s true. She has trouble accepting the new arrangements. She forgets the replacements’ names. “The understudy,” she’ll say to Michael. “What’s her name? You know, that little interloper with the cleavage.”
     Reba can’t deny the arguments in favor of moving on. Still, does it have to appear so easy? Happen so fast? She wonders if Michael could take up with someone new, leave her, the way Dan left Frances? Just like that. One day Dan returned home from a run and announced that he wanted a divorce. The next morning, Frances sat in Reba’s kitchen and between bouts of tears said, “He stood there dripping sweat on the clean kitchen floor, pacing, head bowed. He told me he’s suffocating.” She blew her nose. “And I thought everything was going swimmingly.”

     Earlier in the summer the rabbi and his wife had come for dinner.  Over drinks, the rabbi announced that he’d like to borrow the pool.
     “Borrow my pool?” Reba said.
     “For a conversion,” he replied. Apparently sensing her confusion, he explained that tradition required the convert to attend a mikva, the ritual bathhouse. “But all we really need is a still body of water. Your pool will do.”
     “My pool? A mikva?” Reba thought of dank, mysterious places.
     He dismissed her concern with a priestly wave of the hand. “We make these things up as we go along. You understand, don’t you tsatskeleh?”
     She did not. The idea of purifying oneself before marriage, and then monthly, at the end of each menstrual cycle, struck Reba as quaintly Old World. Superstitious. Crazy. Crazier still in a suburban backyard swimming pool.
     How could this rabbi, a scholar, a renowned free thinker, who presided from the pulpit in bespoke Italian suits, and who once, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, wore a tuxedo (to his congregants’ dismay) instead of priestly white raiments, embrace such hocus-pocus?
     Reba and the rabbi fell into a routine. Her pool became a revolving door through which young women—Samanthas, Alexandras, Heathers, names as interchangeable as their faces—became instant Jews.  Following brief introductions the rabbi would say: “Go with Reba, tsatskeleh. She’ll lead the way to the cabaña.” Always, he pronounced the latter with an exaggerated Spanish flourish.
     Reba played her part, escorting the Samanthas to the powder room, standing outside the door while they changed into bathing suits.  Poolside, as they slipped out of their cover-ups, she turned away with an unforeseen modesty. It wasn’t the flesh that unsettled her, but the vulnerability of these unsuspecting childwomen being swept up in the drama of so unorthodox a production. Mikva. Cabaña. Yiddish. Spanish. How could they know that their baptism in a faux mikva was the wild invention of a notorious rule bender?Shouldn’t their initiation be harder, entail some sacrifice? To join so troubled a group of people should require something more than a few classes and a dip in a kidney-shaped pool. At the very least, they should be dipped in the dank waters of a ritual bathhouse.

     Things got out of control. She’d wanted to end it. Now she’s stopped it so many times in her mind that she’s beginning to believe that she actually told the rabbi: “The pool is closed for cleaning.” Or,  “The cabaña roof caved in.” The truth is, Reba can’t even walk out into her own backyard, march up to Frances and say, “What are you doing here?”
     Frances. There she is, hoisting herself up the ladder, shaking her head like a wet dog. Now, Reba tells herself. March out there.
    Then Frances tugs at the elastic leg band of her swimsuit and tucks in her escaped buttock flesh. She doesn’t know I’m watching, Reba thinks.  Suddenly, it occurs to her that she might learn something new about her friend of forty years, though she already knows too much.  She knows, for example, that Frances didn’t get out of bed for three weeks after Dan left, except to stumble to the bathroom, or accept packages from the UPS carrier who delivered the various items she’d ordered from the bedside phone. Patchouli bath oil. Leather pants. A milk foamer for cappuccino.
     Now. Reba starts for the door, then pauses as Frances removes a compact from her straw bag. She watches as her friend freshens her lipstick, bares her teeth to check for smudges, peers up her nostrils.  Frances chucks herself under the chin and frowns. Then she anoints her body with tanning oil, sinks back and closes her eyes.
     You’ve got to tell her. “Dan is coming to dinner. With Effie.”
     She remembers the morning Frances called. “Effie,” she whispered. “Her name is Effie.” Then she hung up and Reba dropped everything and drove straight to Frances’ house.
     Go out there. Now. Tell her the dinner was Michael’s idea. Tell her about the mismatched socks; the shirts, still at the cleaners.
     She will not say, “I’ve met her. She was here. In the pool. The same pool that you’ve been drifting in all afternoon.”
     Reba is repelled by the notion. It feels too intimate, like sharing a bath with a stranger, or worse, an exchange of bodily fluids.
     She starts for the door again, but then Frances rolls over onto her stomach, causing her encased buttock flesh to escape.
     Reba, who turned so modestly from the Samanthas, is transfixed.
     Soon, she tells herself.
     Soon.